Gutterstars
by poisontaster
Summary: PreSeries. Simon tries to find River.
1. Chapter 1

_"River--"_ He wakes calling her name and gets a mouthful of muck for his trouble. 

Simon rolls onto his back--too fast--and the world revolves around him. And not in a good way. The gritty foulness in his mouth and nostrils makes him choke and then retch. Another fast twist and he spews thin sooty bile into the gutter.

The gutter. That's where he's woken. He wishes it was the first. No, scratch that; he wishes it's the _last_. But probably not. Why is it that clandestine so often has to be filthy as well?

Sitting up, he pats his pockets, still numb and sickened. At least they seem to have left him with his ident card this time, whoever ithey/i are. Best not to ask, he's learned. He's always been a quick study. _Though not,_ he reflects ruefully, _quite quick enough._

Blood and other best-left-unnamed fluids drip from his straight, fine hair, black in the sulfur colored street light. Simon touches with ginger fingers and finds a gash in his scalp, tender to the touch, but not too worrisome. He looks at his chrono. Or really, the pale place where his chrono had been.

_Damn it._

It had been a graduation present from his parents. Aside from any sentimental value, it was worth nearly four hundred cred to a even half-reputable dealer. Probably less half that, here in the black, but _still_. He _needs_ that money. If it'll get River back, he'll hock every stick and fragment he owns.

But first things first.

_LOC-unknown._ In the black-out zone, there are few ways to mark time. Buried beneath the cities that spawned them like bastard children, the black overhead never changes to mark dawn or midday. The pirated electricity and neon never varies except during the brown-outs when current is rerouted just ahead of the city officials' cutting them off. So he might have been lying in this gutter for only moments or more than a day. Although if it had been that long, someone would inevitably rolled him for his ident card. So...not long.

"My name is Simon Tam," he murmurs aloud. He doesn't have to lower his voice; none of the whores, bully-boys, pimps, dealers, or skulking 'businessmen' that populate these dark streets is going to give him a second glance. Not now, his fine clothes marinated in who-knows-what and ruined, a thin trickle of blood running down his cold face. If he had money, it's surely gone now, and that means he's useless to them, expendable, a hundred like him waking in gutters and alleys all over the sector. He remembers Gemma telling him that some of the younger (read: stupider) rakes of well-to-do families come down to the black-out zones on a lark, to drink and gamble and whore in the lowest dives they can find.

He's been in some of those dives, following a slender thread of hope, rather than dissolution. The only conclusion he's come to is those boys are plain stupid or crazy, because from moment to moment, there's never a time he doesn't wish he's _anywhere_ but here. He can't remember the last time he didn't feel cold, didn't feel afraid. Not just because he's thrown away a promising medical career and a comfortable life, not just because this world is nothing like the one he's come from and he's never been so utterly out of his depth, and not just because he's convinced that any one of these sordid, filthy brigands is going to kill him any second. No. In the larger scheme of things, these are trivial considerations, which is why he can keep pushing forward, reckless, his path lit by the light of the bridges burning brightly behind. But the possibility of failure...

_They're hurting us. Get me out._ That's what River's letters were trying to tell him, all that time. All that _wasted_ time. All the gibberish that his parents had dismissed as another of River's flights of fancy. _They're hurting us._

The thought of someone hurting her turns him sick and angry, an incoherent and towering rage like nothing in his cool, calm and ordered life. Next to it, even his passion for medicine is merely a candle flame, pallid and unconsuming. River. Brilliant, beautiful, occasionally exasperating, _River._

His hands fist, and the spike of his pulse sends hammers of pain through his aching head. He carefully unmakes his fists and cups his face in his hands. He wonders if he's going to be sick again. Wonders if there's anything left in his stomach to throw up. He can't remember the last time he ate.

That worries him. The crack on his skull could mean that he's concussed. He repeats his name, the date, the names of the Alliance heads. It all comes, fast and sure. He looks around again, and amidst convincing himself that he's not seeing double, it occurs to him that maybe he should get out of the gutter.

He needs to figure out the time; now that he's opened the gates, all his memory comes flooding back, and he has a meeting. If it's real. If it's not too late.


	2. Chapter 2

Slayervixen's isn't even a proper bar; just a space between buildings where some opportunistic soul threw up some canvas, threw down some scarred tables and chairs of scavenged wood, and started serving the worst rotgut in the sector. Or so he's heard. Gemma warned him about actually drinking any of the vile stuff, and it's smell--something like the industrial floor cleanser the hospital uses--discourages any investigation. He almost feels drunk just from the fumes that drift up from the none-too-clean glass. 

_Don't try to fit in,_ she'd advised further. Her lips twitched against a laugh as she surveyed his first attempt to mimic street clothes. _You don't have the body language or the street smarts to carry it off, and wearing the wrong thing_--she flicked the spiked band around his wrist, eyes dancing in time with her quirking mouth--_could just get you killed. Well, if you're lucky. Plenty of your folk do business in the zones without bothering with all the foofaraw. Look like you're about business and keep your head down and you'll be all right._

He'd feel better with her here; Gemma was born in the black-out zone, a fact that he alone of all their circle knew. But for Gemma to come back would destroy all her careful work to escape this life and destroy any hope of a future. It would be a pretty poor payment for all the help she's given, without a question asked.

It was right after his second time in the zone, the same day his father had repudiated him. He'd been trying to stitch up his own eyebrow and making a right mess of it when Gemma had walked in on him. She halted in the doorway awkwardly, and he saw only a momentary flash of surprise cross her face before it smoothed into cool blankness. He'd blushed, a climbing wave of carnation pink from his naked waist to his hairline, and fumbled for something to say. Before he could do more than stammer, she held up one golden-brown hand. "Let me do that," she said. "Before you put your eye out."

He didn't really know Gemma before, other than the commonplaces of their shared education, their shared vocation. She'd been a couple hundredths of a point ahead of him throughout Medacad, no matter how hard he crammed, how well he did in dissection, or surgery, in lecture. She'd been the favorite of Dr. Chow, and tapped for the surgical team ahead of him. She can eat and drink most of the other residents under the table, and knows all the words to 'A Surgeon's Staff Has a Knob on the End', including some verses _he's_ too ashamed to sing in public, even when soused. She never curses, and she never seems to get mad, or frazzled, or tired. In short, he hated her. They all had. And he's never known enough about her to feel any different.

Even now, he can't say he knows her any better. Her advice about the black-out zones and its denizens has been presented in the same manner as her help in stitching his eyebrow--without comment or explanation. Really, he's grateful for their mutal silence. As much as he'd like to be able to confide in _anyone_, to feel a little less terrified, a little less alone, he can't afford to get anyone else entangled, and he absolutely can't afford distraction. Not with River's life on the line.

_Not too late_, he thinks. His hands tighten on his pint glass. _Please, just don't let me be too late._

He can't think the word _dead_, won't.

A whore in thigh high spike heels steps over the back of the chair opposite him and sits.

"Uh...I'm not looking for a date," he avers quickly. He feels less an ass saying it now than the first seventeen times. _Heh. Maybe practice really does make perfect._ The Companion's Guild is pretty ruthless about regulating the sex trade in the City Above, but in it's dark mirror, freelancers abound. Well...not exactly _free_.

"And I ain't offering one," the whore replies calmly. "You're awful choosy about your company, sweetcheeks. 'Specially for someone who's 'sposed to be _desperate_."

Simon blinks, and really _focuses_ on her for the first time. Between the ridiculous, elaborate and filthy wig of braided copper horsehair, the thick plaster of cosmetics and a shiny layer of protective ointment, her actual features are hard to make out. _Which_, he guesses belatedly, _is the whole idea_. He's left only with the impression of cold and piercing green eyes and a chin pointed enough to cut.

"I _am_ desperate," he answers. His voice comes out more calmly than he expects, though he is still white knuckled around his glass. "Are you... You're not the Hooded Man." He cringes just saying it; it's like the games River would invent, during her conspiracy theory fad. Except it wasn't a game, it was deadly serious, and if he muffs it, the penalty will be much worse than River sulking for the rest of the afternoon. That silence would last only hours, this will last the rest of his broken, empty life.

"No," the whore agrees, "but you din't think he'd come and meet with such as you in person, did ya?"

"No," Simon agrees distantly. Another set of rules he doesn't know; perhaps it's a game after all. "I suppose not."

She grabs the glass of rotgut from him, drains half of it in a swallow and licks her upper lip langorously. Simon's stomach churns, just watching. Or maybe it's the lack of food. At least his scalp lac's stopped bleeding. "You can call me Freyki."

"Freyki," he repeats, mostly so he'll remember it. There's something about the name, just out of reach; a sense of familiarity with simultaneous alarm bells. But having chased his dream of medicine so wholeheartedly, so much of everything else collapses into shadows and ash. River will know; River always does. When he tells her the stories of his excursions and she laughs at him, he'll have to ask. "So...how do we do this?"

"I'm going to get up from this table," she says, suiting action to words, "and I'm going to come round to sit on your lap." The impossibly cruel spike of her boot traces a line across his thigh. He shivers and tries not to think of words like _femoral artery_ and _bled out_. She settles, straddling. She is surprisingly light and her short kimono rides up to show panties of black lace. By a reflex he didn't know he possesses, his hands rise to cradle her hips, steadying her. "Not too friendly, now," she admonishes. "That costs extra."

"I'm not... I wasn't..."

"Hush, sweetcheeks," she leans closer, the thick strands of her wig falling over them both to obscure their faces, effective camouflage. "Play nice and we'll both be happy. Now. What's the job?"

"I..." He marshalls his scattered wits. "My sister. River--"

"No," Freyki says sharply, her tone a marked contrast to the lithe movement of her body against his. "No names. Better for us both that way."

"Fine. She's in a locked government facility. I need to get her out and I need to get us both off-planet."

"Fed facility, eh? Huh. You don't look the type, sweetcheeks."

"Stop calling me sweetcheeks. Can you do the job or not?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, won't be cheap."

"I'm not worried about the cost."

Freyki gives him a look that makes him want to check his ident card. "No, I guess you wouldn't be."

"Can you do it?" he persists. He feels tired and sick, despite the movement of her thighs over his, her cleavage. She is stale, and sordid as everything here, and none of this has anything to do with River. He just wants it over with. He just wants his sister.

"What facility?"

"The Academy."

He's warned by the flare of her pupils--shock, dismay, horror. Suddenly he is the unclean one. Suddenly he is dangerous. Freyki lurches back, onto the table, and spills his drink. He's not sorry. "Get out of here," she whispers, pale even beneath the spackle of her maquillage.

"No... What..? You said you could help me..."

"_Bi zui_ You _yu bun duh go tsao de_ bastard!" Freyki is still whispering, wriggling backwards across the table like his touch is contagious. Suddenly she shouts: "Get out of here!"

Immediately the bar falls silent. Everyone loves good street theater, and everyone hates to miss a show. A trio of men in laborers togs gambling at the next table stand up. And up. And up.

"Yo, Pandora, this _fei fei de pi yan_ giving you a hard time?"

Simon pushes back his chair and stands, putting some distance not only between him and Pandora/Freyki, but the laborers as well. He's always been a quick study. "I don't want any trouble," he says quickly, holding up his hands harmlessly. "It's fine. I'm going."

He's almost to the door when a meaty hand falls on his shoulder and he reflects again, _But not quite quick enough._


	3. Chapter 3

"Simon Tam." 

At the sound of Dr. Chow's voice, he halts, swaying. He knows he's late. He knows how he looks, unkempt and stained and bloody. There wasn't time to go all the way cross city to his dorm; he hoped to shower before anyone saw him. No such luck. He's not even sure how much he cares.

The copper-blood in his mouth tastes like failure. _Another_ failure. Another dead end.

"Sir." His only hope is to bluff this through. As long as River remains out of reach, he needs this job. He needs the money. He fixes his eyes on a point ten inches to the left of Dr. Chow's ear and makes his face a mask. He's had lots of practice with this part, made easier by the fact it hurts to move his face.

"You're late," Dr Chow's clipped tones make this a sin on par with matricide, genocide, whatever 'cide you choose to insert. Except what's dying here is obviously his career. As the older doctor came closer, his nose wrinkles. "And you _smell_. Come with me."

A short walk to Dr. Chow's cubicle, but he's aware of every glance, every whispered comment. It should seem more dire. He's worked so hard for this, to get here. A few months ago, it was his whole life. But he supposes that's not really true. Medicine is all he remembers wanting, but memory is fickle. Now he thinks his life has belonged to River from the beginning, from that first toothless grin and joyous pump of fat baby limbs to their resolutely not-tearful goodbye on the Metaflash docks.

_I always thought it was River who was lost without her big brother..._ their father said, _now I'm starting to wonder if it isn't the other way around._

Funny that Gabriel Tam had to pick _that_ moment to be insightful, when ordinarily he avoided introspection like plague.

_Think about the consequences_, he'd said, as well.

_I am, Dad_, Simon thinks. _I'm thinking of the consequences of a life without River. And that I just can't contemplate. Not for a minute. Not even as a joke._

"I have to admit I'm at a loss with you, Tam." Chow says as Simon half-falls into the hard plas chair on the other side of Chow's desk. The impact jars every bruise and abrasion; he shuts his teeth on a whimper. "You're not a stupid boy. You come from an excellent family. And up until recently, you gave every indication of becoming a sterling doctor. Now this."

"Sir?"

Chow sighs. "Look at you, Tam. I mean _really_; look at you. You show up late for rounds. You look like you've taken up a second job as a professional gladiator, and half the time lately you don't seem to be able to tell the difference between a pituitary gland and a mammary gland. _Ren-tse de fo zui_, boy, what is _wrong_ with you?"

"Nothing," he answers, because what else can he say? _Gee, Dr. Chow, my brilliant _mei mei _has been kidnapped by the government for purposes unknown and she's been sending me messages in code to try and get me--yes, ME--to come and rescue her because they're hurting her, you see; yes, the government, and..._ He stops there, wondering if he'd be able to take such a declaration seriously if he'd been on the other end of it. Probably not. But Chow didn't really know him or River. Hell, if it came to that, neither did their parents. But he knew. River was a lot of things, but she wasn't a liar. Not about something like this. "I've being going through some personal things..."

"Is it a girl?" Dr. Chow asks and spreads his hands wide in a gesture of helplessness. "I might understand if it was a girl. I don't understand, right now, Tam, and I really want to. I'm trying to help you, in case you hadn't noticed."

"Yes," he says immediately; ithat/i seems safe enough. Except that's not how Chow means it. "No," he says next, but that doesn't seem like enough, so he amends: "It's complicated."

"Isn't it always?" Chow says, and his voice fills with a wealth of world-weariness. "But the point is that you're not leaving me much room to manuever here, Simon. You could be a brilliant doctor, You _are_ a brilliant doctor. You've worked so hard to just throw it out like so much _luh suh_ now. Have you considered that? This is your _career_. Every action you take now is going to have repercussions, and you owe it to yourself to make sure they're ones you can live with. For God's sakes, think of the consequences."

"You're right, sir," Simon agrees. It's not just face time; he recognizes every word the older man has said as the truth. But as in his argument with his father, there are consequences and consequences. Those you can live with, and those you can't. "And I'm sorry. I know I've put you in an awkward position."

This too is true. He _is_ sorry. Chow has been his mentor, and friend. It seems poor repayment to slough aside his chosen vocation--as Chow said--as so much _luh suh_. But it's the only coin he has to offer. He's made his decisions, and though they leave him in a welter of regrets, not a single one of them compares to the horrible vista of a world without River in it.

"That you have." Chow scrubs a heavy hand over his face, a characteristic gesture. "But not an irreparable one." He fixes Simon with a tired and regretful gaze. "I'm placing you on probation, Simon. You have three months to get yourself together and decide if this is something you really _want_ to do. I hope you'll think carefully on what I've said."

"Yes," Simon agrees, glad its no worse than this. Glad he'll be able to keep earning--hopefully enough to buy River free, since he's always proven fairly incompetent at derring-do. He's under no illusions; he's not brave. River's always been the brave one. But what he lacks in balls-out courage he's always been able to compensate for in sheer determination. "I'm grateful, sir. Really I am."

"But you're not convinced," Chow says. He sounds sad. "So be it. I've said my piece, made my appeal to your better nature. But Simon, I truly hope you don't come to regret this later."

"I do too, sir."


	4. Chapter 4

"Simon. I need to talk to you." Gemma appears from a side corridor, clean and quiet as a cat in her scrubs. He envies her. There was a time he looked much the same. Now he has more in common with the patients, scrubs or not.

"Can we make it another time?" He keeps walking. Suddenly Gemma's presence is two-edged, a reminder of failure in two very different lives. "Chow just put me on probation and I'm already late for rounds."

"Simon--wait!" she chases after, harder with her shorter legs. "It's important."

He turns and offers a helpless shrug; she darts and snatches his sleeve. "I know! About your sister... River."

He cracks like a scab. In surgery, he knows he's a man cool in the sun, but worrying about River, about time, about money--_so much worry_--has eroded the armor that's always protected him. He grabs her wrist, hard enough to leave bruises and drags her out of the hallway's center. "What? Huh? What do you think you know about my sister?"

Even manhandled, Gemma's eyes bore steadily into his. "I know where she is."

Later.

Only a little; not enough time for him to process the enormity of this revelation, but enough for a change of location.

The canteen is awash in people, students, doctors, nurses, patients and patients' families. He feels hideously exposed. This isn't clandestine. But this isn't his game, either. It's never been his game. He'd like to imagine himself a knight, maneuvering to protect the Queen, but he suspects that's really too high to aspire. _Even a pawn can capture a king_, he reminds himself.

"How?" he asks finally, the first words he's spoken since she propelled him here like a dressmaker's wooden dummy.

Gemma regards him, a blank slate other than the trace of impatience. "Does it matter? We know where she is. We can get her out."

_Ah_, he thinks. _**We.**_

But in the end, it doesn't matter, and he knows it. Prices exist to be paid. "Tell me," he says.

Gemma starts talking. He listens to it all, but he hears only parts; his mind Dopplers in and out like a fading wave signal. Nonetheless, he _understands_.

Some of it he thinks he should have known before now, guessed. Gemma _told_ him she'd been born in the black...and now here she is. "Gifted", they'd always said, but it didn't give him presence of mind to connect the dots between those two destinations and realise she had to have help, her mysterious 'we'. He didn't remember that nothing came for free, especially futures. And even Gemma's future--or the possibility thereof--came with a price. That she paid that price gladly was of no consequence.

"You...you've been out there now, Simon," she says, "You know what it's like, at least a little. And no matter how smart I am, all I was ever going to be was--at best--some 'businessman's' brains, or doxy, or both. _Jian ta de gui_! But the Alliance...the Alliance doesn't care, as long as the status quo is maintained. People--a person--don't matter to them."

"I don't care about your politics," he says. "I'm not interested in anything, other than River. Tell me about _River_."

Again her face is impatient, dappled in contempt. She is _zhen zheng xin tu_, a true believer, a zealot. He wonders how he never saw it before. "Do you know what they're doing to her? In their...their labs? How many have died? They're playing with her _brain_, Simon."

He doesn't know exactly what that means, but he can conjure all the horrible words: _vivisection, dissection, electroconvulsive therapy, lobotomized_. He can create the pictures, lobes, and gyri and sulci, pink in health and grayish in death.

_Not dead_ mei mei, Lao tian, _not dead_...

"What do you want?" he interrupts her. Maybe later he'll be able to stomach the description of what they've done to River, but not now. Not yet.

"Nothing you're not willing to give," Gemma answers, now sullen.

"Money," he answers for her, and surprisingly, his cool returns, armor and armament both. It's not that he has the upper hand, he's painfully aware he _doesn't_, but there's something about dealing from the bottom. It's not that he has nothing to lose, but what he has to lose is all he has. All or nothing. The simplicity of it is strangely delightful.

"Yes." She names an outrageous sum. It will take some creative bookkeeping, especially if he's to have enough left for them to get lost, far enough to not be found, but it can be done.

_All or nothing_, he thinks.

"How will you do it?"

"We'll get her out in cryo. Meet you in Persephone. It's a main layover point for almost anything on the outer planets. From there you can go anywhere, the two of you."

_I won't come for you_. Gabriel Tam had said too, in the ugly aftermath of Simon's arrest. _If you leave here, if you do this...I will not come for you._

It hurt at the time--still does--but in many ways it's always only the two of them--him and River.

The older Tams love their children--even now he doesn't doubt that--but it's like the light of the blue sun; distant, and not always warming. And sometimes it's more harmful than helpful.

If he does this--_when_ he does this, because who is he kidding?--in all likelihood, neither he nor River will ever see them again. Never suffer through another another lecture on familial responsibility or have his mother's fussy fingers pick another piece of non-existent lint from his waistcoat before he leaves. Never sit in his father's warm, aromatic study with a snifter of brandy in hand while his father confides in him the business schemes and hopes of advancement he can't share with his largely incomprehending wife. Never have his mother's _wu jia pi_, or her special flan, neither of which she ever leaves to the servants, made by her own well-kept hands.

If he dwells on these memories too long, they will bleed, so like the surgeon he once wanted to become, he cauterizes them and hopes they don't fester.

"When?" His voice seems to belong to someone else, even sounds like someone else, but Gemma doesn't seem to notice, so maybe it's just him.

"Two days. That's when they'll hit the facility."

"Not 'we'?" The old loftiness, the cool arrogance, is back in his voice. He's never noticed it before, but he recognizes it now. Some things, he supposes, only become obvious in their absence. He wields it now like a weapon and knows it will work.

As he thought, Gemma blushes. She may look down on him for being a rich man's son, and pig-ignorant of the politics that make up her little life, but no one entirely escapes social conditioning. "They've risked too much to put me here to ruin it now," she explains.

"Ah," is the only comment he makes, and is rewarded by the deepening of color and the hardening of her expression.

"It's three days passage to Persephone...your contact will be..."

"No," Simon says softly.

"N...no?" Gemma is completely jarred; for the first time, he sees in her the girl, the woman. It's an interesting contrast. "What do you mean _no_?"

"I mean _no_," Simon says calmly. "As the financial backer for this little operation, and quite a few to come, for what you're asking, it seems to me I have some rights. I'm coming with."

Gemma's mouth opens and closes several in speechless astonishment. It would be funny, in different circumstances. "Simon, I... I never thought... I can't authorize that," she stammers finally.

"I didn't expect you could. But you know who can. Wave them. Your people need this money, as much as I need River. You wouldn't be doing this otherwise, would you?" He holds up his hand as Gemma opens her mouth to protest. "Don't," he warns. "You said it...I know what it's like, at least a little...and what I know is that nothing comes for free, not even altruism. You tell me the Alliance doesn't care...but you and your people don't care either. I'm just a means to an end. And that's fine. Now we both know where we stand. But where I'm standing is next to my sister, or this doesn't happen. So wave whoever you need to, and make it so."

Gemma's mouth shuts with a nearly audible snap. Wordless, she gets up from the table and stalks away, towards the public use wave sets. Once she's out of sight, Simon slumps in the chair, suddenly, keenly aware of every abrasion, bruise and throbbing ache. He feels hollowed out, but curiously its not terrible. It's an emptiness waiting to be filled.

_I guess it's derring do, after all_, he thinks to himself, and laughs.


End file.
